Test-Taking Strategy Yields Major Gains

Students at a high school in rural North Carolina who once would not
have considered college are posting strong SAT scores and getting
financial-aid offers from competitive schools, thanks to free and
abundant help provided by their school district in preparing for the
exam.

Two years ago, many high school seniors in Kings Mountain, N.C.,
would have given as much thought to decoding the secrets of the SAT as
they would have to becoming the next Indiana Jones. For students
without the academic and financial tools to crack the college-
admissions test, success on the exam seemed about as likely as
navigating a stream stocked with hungry alligators.

So in 1998, the Kings Mountain school district moved to level the
playing field for poor and well-to-do students. Administrators spent
$7,000 on an intensive, computer-based SAT-preparation program that
provided remedial help and test-taking strategies to all 10th, 11th,
and 12th graders at the 1,150-student Kings Mountain High
School—and at no cost to the students.

Providing that kind of help is an increasingly popular remedy among
policymakers from the local to the federal level who are worried about
unequal access to college—and it's an approach that Kings
Mountain officials say has paid off.

"This wasn't the kind of place where many students even considered
higher education," said Jane King, the district's administrator of
curriculum and instruction. Now the testing pool "is definitely more
diverse."

About 22 percent of students in the district are African-American,
Ms. King said. About 37 percent of the district's students qualify for
free or reduced-price lunch.

The district has seen "phenomenal gains" in its students'
entrance-exam scores, Ms. King added. Some are boosting their scores by
100, 200, even 300 points, she said.

That means Kings Mountain students are suddenly eligible to attend
colleges once seen as a stretch. They are also garnering better
financial-aid packages—a ticket to higher education for students
from underrepresented groups.

Other districts, states, and the federal government are zeroing in
on free test-preparation as the path to higher entrance-exam scores and
rates of college enrollment for minority and low-income students.

Policies for subsidizing test preparation have popped up in
districts from Maryland to Texas, and a program is being tried
statewide in California. Lawmakers in Colorado, Massachusetts,
Virginia, and Washington state recently proposed such programs.
President Clinton took up the cause in his State of the Union speech
last month, asking Congress to allocate $10 million in competitive
grants in fiscal 2001 to pay for test preparation.

"Unless you're going to have a well-organized, long-term preparation
program in high school, you don't see the results," said Stephen M.
Preston, the director of research and evaluation for the Georgia
Department of Education, which allotted state funding for such programs
in 1998 and 1999.

Critics argue that such measures are a superficial fix. Most high
schools, they contend, would be better off improving their curricula so
that students are better-prepared for college work and admissions
tests.

"Addressing [participation and scores] though last-minute
test-preparation programs strikes me as treating the symptom rather
than the cause," said Thomas Mortenson, the publisher of the newsletter
Postsecondary Education Opportunity and a policy analyst for the
Center for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, a
Washington-based independent research group.

Each year, some 3.7 million students take the SAT or the ACT, the
two standardized college-entrance exams used nationwide, and each year
African-American and Hispanic students score lower—much
lower—than their white counterparts. Testing companies report
that the gap has persisted for more than 20 years.There is no
comparable data available for previous years at either testing
company.

Many experts who support funding for test preparation point to
students' socioeconomic backgrounds and to the poor quality of their
K-12 schooling to explain the gap. They say that many minority and low-
income students don't have the money to take the exam-preparation
courses that are taught by private companies.

'An Equity Issue'

Those who support test-preparation funding also say poor and
minority students are more likely than whites and middle- and
upper-income students to live in districts of lesser quality that fail
to teach the challenging material covered on the college- entrance
tests.

"It is obvious that the SAT is an important and critical component
of academic success," said Bill Lawrence, the secondary director for
the northeast area for the suburban Baltimore County, Md., school
district, which recently began underwriting intensive test-preparation
programs in all of its 24 high schools.

"This is an equity issue," he said. "We wanted to make sure that
students had equal information."

As President Clinton fashions the details of his test-preparation
proposal, one White House aide says he is looking west to California as
a model.

In 1998, policymakers in that state passed a law detailing the
College Preparation Partnership Program. The initiative authorized $10
million annually until 2005 for competitive grants to schools to pay
for 20 hours of SAT and ACT preparation and test-taking in poor
communities, said Ron Fox, the manager of the intersegmental- relations
office at the California Department of Education.

Local districts must come up with the money to finance one-third of
the cost of such programs. Schools are given the choice of training
staff members to run the programs or contracting with companies that
provide the services.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the initiative is yielding bigger and
more diverse pools of test-takers in the state and raising scores as
well.

"We are seeing low-income and minority students who understand they
need to take an SAT to be eligible for admission to a four-year
college, whereas before, I don't know if that information would have
gotten to them as effectively," said Jay Rosner, the executive director
of the Princeton Review Foundation in San Francisco. The foundation is
the nonprofit arm of the New York City-based Princeton Review, the
company that is overseeing test preparation for more than 10,000 high
school students under the 1998 California law.

"Average improvement is between 80 and 100 points" out of 1600
points on the exam, Mr. Rosner said, for students in California who
have completed the program, compared with their previous scores.

The Princeton Review, which has been in the business of test
preparation for 19 years, has tailor-made courses for California that
take into account the special needs of low- performing students, he
added. Two-hour sessions are held both before and after school and
focus on test-taking strategies as well as teaching skills.

"We've added more instructional materials for the easy and medium
[test] problems because those are the questions that they have to get
correct to improve their scores," Mr. Rosner said. The Princeton Review
is paid $300 per student, he said, with similar commercial courses
ranging from $250 to $450 per student.

Scholastic Testing Systems, the test-preparation company based in
Alexandria, Va., that helped raise scores in North Carolina's Kings
Mountain district, spends 80 percent of students' time on remedial
work, said William J. Zuberduhler, the company's chief executive
officer. Computer-based software presents students with a detailed
analysis of the 58 skills tested on SAT exams, he said, then ranks each
individual's weaknesses.

Misplaced Spending?

But such efforts are valuable only because of fundamental flaws in
the K-12 system, some education experts argue. Instead of hiring
companies to provide remedial help for students about to take
college-entrance exams, they say, schools should be strengthening the
curriculum for all students.

"If I were in charge, I'd be investing the dollars not in
preparation for a test, but in efforts to make sure low-income kids got
a strong grounding in English and mathematics, the two things the tests
examine," said Kati Haycock, the executive director of the Education
Trust, a Washington- based organization that promotes higher academic
achievement for poor and minority students.

Guidance counselors are so overburdened they don't have time to help
individual students prepare for the exams, said Kris Zavoli, the
director of admissions and guidance services for the College Board's
Western regional office in San Jose, Calif.

"We say there are no secrets for taking the SAT," said Wayne Camara,
the executive director of research and development for the New York
City-based College Board, which sponsors the exam. "But just as you
wouldn't want to take a driver's test cold, you don't want to go cold
into the SAT."

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